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A girl with a face like eager flame who was dressed with a maddening perversity of wrongness, but who one day would undoubtedly hold the world in her hands for good or evil.

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“There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible” 

alexds1:

Disclaimer: this rant is written for a specific group of people. If you don’t belong to it, you already know that you don’t, congratulations, great shall be your reward in the afterlife.

DEAR [PEOPLE WHO DEBATE ABOUT SHERLOCK HOLMES’ SEXUALITY],

Read More

Hi there! I don’t know who “specific group of people” refers to, but I have a suspicion, based on the contents of this post, that it’s “people who will not call me out on my massive douchebaggery”. Hey, guess what? You’re shit out of luck on that one!

Honestly, there was so much offensiveness here that I had to pick one thing to focus on, so I decided to move past the whole “no one else counts except for me!!11!11!” part of it, because my dear and lovely favourite gyzym has done that here, and focus on your incredibly problematic opinions about the queering of literature. But first, let’s see some evidence, of which you seem so fond, yeah?

I’m not going to assume that all of the people who have seen and enjoy the modern franchises are terrible terrible people haven’t read the original books, that’s not fair.

No, it’s not! I am a postgrad English Literature student who also studies film media and literary theory, and I have read every Sherlock Holmes story, and love Brett and Downey Jr. and Cumberbatch, for varying reasons, and in varying amounts. (I have problems with the latter adaptation for reasons that also relate to queer theory and Moffat’s writing ability, but not the fundamental idea of re-imagining a text— that I love.)

if you read the canonical material, their relationship and characters are blatantly obvious

Well, to put it bluntly: no. Unless you think that all cultural studies academics should just go home right now! It appears that this is news to you, but it is possible for there to be different interpretations of a singular text and for the text to capable of being used to support both interpretations. (See The Turn of the Screw - are there really ghosts, or is she mad? People - by which I mean critics - have been arguing about that for decades!) 

I mean, for all that you’re critical of people who haven’t read the stories, you don’t seem to know them all that well! You say that:

Holmes is in love with nothing but exercising his intellect. This is blatantly stated in the first paragraph of the true Holmes stories, Scandal in Bohemia

All emotions, and [love] particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.

Well, yes, the text does say that, (also, I don’t know what you mean by “true Holmes stories”, the first Sherlock Holmes story was A Study in Scarlet, but, whatever), but let me show you this extract from The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, where Holmes believes Watson has been fatally shot:

It was worth a wound—it was worth many wounds—to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.

… 

“If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive.”

That doesn’t really sound like a man who doesn’t feel emotion to me. Now, you see, you may disagree with me, but I will still have this extract to support my argument, do you see where I’m going with this? (Also, chronologically, this story is later than A Scandal in Bohemia, when, arguably, Watson knew Holmes even better than he did in Bohemia.)

But that’s not really my problem, here, to be honest. My problem is how incredibly dismissive you are of even the possibility that there could be queer subtext in Sherlock Holmes, because, you claim:

Reading this and thinking about his sexuality is like reading Moby Dick and theorizing about the whale’s sexuality. It says less about the subject and more about you trying to force this character whose was defined 100 years before you were born into a mold that fits the lifestyle that most occupies your thoughts, in an intensely self-serving and incomprehensible way. Sex is never mentioned in the stories outside of the context of children or pregnant women, so it is a non-issue.

And:

And for the love of god stop treating sexuality like it is the pinnacle of every piece of work. Sherlock Holmes was written at a time when the media didn’t have the power to spoon feed you propaganda on how to feel emotionally fulfilled. If shipping and relationships are the only thing you can focus on, you are surely missing the point.

Okay, do you actually understand why sex is rarely mentioned in Sherlock Holmes? Do you understand why the media didn’t “have the power” to talk about anything other than heterosexuality? Do you, in fact, understand why the word “lifestyle” is offensive? 

Let me break it down for you, okay? 

The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885

Re-criminalised homosexuality by extending “buggery” laws to include any kind of sexual activity between males.

The Labouchere Amendment (Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885) AKA the “blackmailer’s charter”

The Amendment made “gross indecency” a crime in the United Kingdom. The Act contained no definition of “gross indecency,” as Victorian morality demurred from precise descriptions of activity held to be immoral. In practice, the law was used broadly to prosecute male homosexuals where actual sodomy (meaning, in this context, anal intercourse) could not be proven. The penalty of life imprisonment for sodomy (until 1861 it had been death) was also so harsh that successful prosecutions were rare.

The Trial of Oscar Wilde

Wilde was convicted under section 11 and sentenced to 2 years of hard labour, which, by all accounts, ruined his life, as there was no way for him to return to society after such a public scandal. He was a friend of Conan Doyle, (see here), and encouraged Doyle to revive Sherlock Holmes. 

The Trial of Alan Turing

Turing, widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, was a British codebreaker of whom it is said that the Allies would not have won the Second World War without. In 1952 he was convicted under section 11 and sentenced to chemical castration, lost his security clearance, and then almost certainly committed suicide by eating an apple he injected with cyanide.

Male homosexual acts were not decriminalised in England and Wales until 1967, 1980 in Scotland, and 1982 in Northern Ireland. These laws ruined the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of men, and created an atmosphere of fear where many men - and women, who, although not included under this act, lesbianism was by no means any more accepted than male homosexuality - always had to live with the possibility of being “found out” hanging over their heads.

See, this is why I have such a problem with your insistence that only your opinion about Sherlock Holmes’ sexuality matters. Generations of queer people and queer theorists have looked at these stories and seen something that they recognised in themselves, or something that lurked beneath the surface. I’m not saying that this is what Conan Doyle intended, I don’t have a crystal ball, (but I would point out that he was a leading advocate of correcting injustice against minorities whose legal rights would usually have been ignored or dismissed), but that’s the point of literary criticism and reinterpretation: the author’s intentions are not the only ones that matter. (Death of the author, anyone?) 

But this goes beyond your childish insistence that only your opinion matters; this is erasure. It’s nice that you seem to think that you’ve “illustrated my utter disdain for people who put their crotches in front of their brains”, (which is slut-shaming, actually, but, again, I can only deal with one of your many issues in this post, sorry), but the queer history of Sherlock Holmes goes beyond people writing stories about him. (Although, obviously they are equally valid, I am just showing you academic evidence as apparently reinterpretation that involves sex deeply offends you in some way, as opposed to your horrible attitude about slash-writers which is totally proportional and justified, of course!)

A direct quotation from Theory after Theory by Nicholas Birns:

Queer theorists, for example, often read as gay the relationship of sleuth Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick and narrator Dr. Watson in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective stories. This reading disturbed those who wanted to see the two men as merely cerebral collaborators with a strong intellectual affinity or who wanted to read the stories as pure entertainment without having to think about social issues… advocates of queer theory, those who saw [it] as an approach rather than a doctrinal reclassification, tended to see this reading a strategic intervention that widened the possibilities of reading. To them, adding a queer dimension to the characters of Holmes and Watson enriched the range of possibilities that reading Conan Doyle’s text offered.

In conclusion: I am a queer person. I am a queer person who doesn’t take very kindly to being told how I should read something, or why. I am a queer person who doesn’t really care that apparently you are offended by some people who write stories on the internet, (seriously? get over yourself), particularly when some of these stories give me narratives that I struggle to find elsewhere, and I don’t take kindly to being told that you think that these narratives are “disrespect[ful]”. I take even less kindly to your erasure of hundreds of years of queer oppression and suffering, however. Do you really think no one has ever said before, “HOLMES AND WATSON AREN’T GAY JUST READ THE STORIES GOD CAN’T YOU READ”? These stories don’t exist, or exist in very small numbers, because they literally could not exist, and if that’s something you don’t know about, then I think you have a lot more books to read than just the Sherlock Holmes stories, which I also suggest you re-read, just for posterity.